Is EHR on Life Support? Short Answer…No

Today, David Swink sent me a link to an article from the Washington Examiner and this quote from the article:

“A revolt is brewing among doctors and hospital administrators over electronic medical records systems mandated by one of President Obama’s early health care reforms.”

“The American Medical Association called for a “design overhaul” of the entire electronic health records system in September because, said AMA president-elect Steven Stack, electronic records “fail to support efficient and effective clinical work.”

It seems like there have been a wave of articles similar to this coming out in the national media. For some reason the national media only likes to report on things when “the sky is falling.” It’s kind of a ridiculous report though.

What’s not ridiculous is that many doctors are dissatisfied with their EHR software. That is something that is real and many are extremely frustrated with it and many of the EHR regulations that require a lot of extra work by them. Does that mean that we’re going to see an EHR “design overhaul” or that the doctors are going to revolt against EHRs and stop using them?

My answer (as the headline alludes) is that it’s not going to happen. Certainly we’re going to see some EHR switching over the next few years. In fact, we might see a lot of EHR switching. However, we’re not going to see a mass of people revolting against EHR and going back to paper. That would be a true revolt and it’s just not going to happen. Like it or not, EHR is the go forward technology that will be used by healthcare to document healthcare.

Meaningful use on the other hand is a different story. I do think that meaningful use is on life support. If the congress can somehow get the Flex-IT Act to pass, then we can take meaningful use off life support, but I’m still not planning to discharge MU from the hospital. The program has some serious health issues.

On a more optimistic note, I’m really excited to see what doctors and hospitals start doing with the data stored in EHR. Is it everything we want it to be? No, but I believe we’re still going to see a lot of good come from EHR software now that EHR’s are implemented and we’ve largely got MU behind us.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • There are lots of physicians that are happy with their EHRs. And let’s not forget that the patient is the consumer, and that healthcare is provided for the consumer — not the doctors. Proper use of a well selected and implemented EHR by a physician will benefit the patient more than paper notes. The doctors that are grumbling need to understand that it is their responsibility to implement the EHR the right way — if they don’t, that is on them.

  • Provider dissatisfaction and medical practice inefficiency as a result of the design of EHR technology cannot be ignored. The complicated software applications combined with industry misinformation and a focus on endless data input and capture is nothing short of overkill. While there may be some good systems out there, how can anyone ignore the frustration and dissatisfaction expressed by a significant percentage of providers and medical practitioners. A redesign is required, and better, easier to use and robust solutions do exist. The industry just needs to be willing to shop arount, switch to better solutions and get off paper all together.

  • Most EHRs (including the big names) have awful UI. Their focus is to “ring-up” charges for services without providing a view that enables clinician to help patients improve health. While the ACA has helped us wrestle many issues related to automating and exchanging health data there still is a long way to go in terms of usability. The Docs have a point!

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